Review: "The Piano Tuner" by Chiang-sheng Kuo

The Piano Tuner by Chiang-sheng Kuo
Translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin
English release 3 January 2023 via Arcade
★★★

Two men, connecting across a spread of piano keys: one having just lost his musician wife, the other the unexpected hero of the story—a piano tuner whose role is to make his own work invisible.

The piano tuner calls himself the narrator rather than the hero of this story, but of course it's more complicated than that. We see the world primarily through his eyes, and our understanding of Lin's relationship with his wife, Emily, comes too primarily through the eyes of the piano tuner. That then makes the piano tuner, perhaps, responsible not only for tuning the musical instruments of the story but for tuning the strings of the story itself.

At well under 200 pages (hard to get an exact page count on an ereader!), this reads in some ways more like a long-form short story than a short-form novel, if that makes sense. With novels, I tend to want all the threads to wrap up one way or another—preferably not all tidily, or with a bow—but with short stories there is, perhaps paradoxically, more room for some of the threads of a story to go off in some unexplored direction. That is the sense I get here: that each thread is an arrow pointing somewhere, sometimes more faintly than others, but that we must use our imaginations to suss out just where those threads will end up.

The Piano Tuner was a smash hit in Taiwan, and although my experience with literature out of Asia is limited (and my experience with literature out of Taiwan very nearly nonexistent), this is the sort of book that makes me yearn for a master's-level literature class in which to dissect and compare and contrast. (And: how would the piano tuner tell this story if he did see himself as the hero of the story?)

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.